Poll: Majority of Canadians do not support Conrad Black returning to Canada

The majority of Canadians would not support the Canadian government issuing a special permit that would allow Conrad Black to return to Toronto while an appeals court reconsiders his case, a public opinion poll shows.

A small survey conducted by Angus Reid found 71% of respondents disagreed with the following question: “Because Conrad Black has been convicted of an indictable offence and is no longer a Canadian citizen, he may need a special minister’s permit from the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration to return to Canada. Thinking about this, would you agree or disagree with the federal government issuing a special permit that would allow Conrad Black to return to Canada?”

Twenty-one percent of Canadians agreed with the idea of the government issuing a special permit, while 9% said they were not sure.

“Of course, I was glad, jubilant, to leave, but also grateful for many of the relationships I had formed; enlightened by my observation of American justice on the other side of the wall; and happy to have got on well in an environment very foreign to any I had known before.”

The Angus Reid poll also found that Canadians are evenly split over whether Lord Black’s Canadian citizenship should be reinstated if he is cleared of all criminal charges after his appeal. Forty-five percent of Canadians agreed; the same proportion of survey respondents disagreed and the remaining 10% said they were not sure.

More than half of the respondents, 54%, did not support the idea of Lord Black’s Canadian citizenship being reinstated if he renounces his seat in the Brtain’s House of Lords. An even higher proportion, 56%, said they believe Lord Black discarded his Canadian citizenship purely for his lordship, while 10% believe he was forced to renounce his citizenship by the Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government. Fully 34% of respondents said they were not sure.

The poll was conducted on July 28 and 29, 2010. The online survey tallied responses from 1,000 Canadians. The results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.